Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    I Used to Know That: English
    I Used to Know That: English
    I Used to Know That: English
    Ebook172 pages1 hour

    I Used to Know That: English

    By Patrick Scrivenor

    2.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Relearn the essential rules of the English language, from grammar and punctuation to sentence construction. Also includes parts of speech and how to improve your spelling and vocabulary. I Used To Know That: English is an accessible yet fun way to revisit the English language while enjoying a walk down memory lane - and remembering the stuff you really shouldn't have forgotten...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateMar 14, 2012
    ISBN9781843179351
    I Used to Know That: English
    Author

    Patrick Scrivenor

    Patrick Scrivenor was brought up in Africa and England and, after studying at Oxford University, served in the army. He has since worked as a journalist and writer. He lives in Kent.

    Related to I Used to Know That

    Related ebooks

    Trivia For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Raise A READER For Life

      Jan 15, 2021

      Raise A READER For Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Finding The Nuances

      Mar 20, 2019

      Finding The Nuances
      4 min read

    • Article

      Is It Possible To Eat Too Much Fruit?

      Jul 9, 2018

      For healthy adults, experts say that eating a lot of fruit is unlikely to get you into trouble, as long as it’s part of a normal diet. The main concern with overeating fruit is its natural sugar, yet research has consistently linked whole-fruit cons

      1 min read

    • Article

      Why Brits Are Monoglots

      Mar 5, 2021

      spectator.co.uk We Brits are often belittled for being terrible at learning foreign languages, says Rory Sutherland. But there is a reason for this. Consider the questions: do I need to learn another language? And what language should I learn? Swed

      1 min read

    • Article

      On The

      Aug 1, 2021

      On The
      4 min read

    • Article

      Talking Heads

      Jul 2, 2020

      A weakness of novice writers – and also pot-boiler novelists with million-dollar publishing deals – is to use dialogue to divulge information. This is sometimes referred to as being expositional or explicatory. It is when characters tell the reader w

      9 min read

    • Article

      Ideas To Help Polish Your Writing

      Aug 3, 2023

      For many people, ‘Give me a vowel’ will bring up an instant reference to the TV programme Countdown. In the context of the game show, vowels and consonants were linked to letters of the alphabet, with A-E-I-O-U being vowels and the other 21 letters c

      3 min read

    • Article

      Society

      Oct 30, 2023

      Every now and then, a story will appear in the media about regional accents disappearing. About how everyone in the north of England will eventually sound the same, or maybe even how they will all start to sound like people from the South. How accent

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Science Of Accents

      Apr 4, 2021

      The Science Of Accents
      5 min read

    • Article

      Why Can’t The English Learn To Talk?

      Jun 1, 2022

      Let’s talk about talking Why are the British, when they congregate, at ease only if they talk about the weather? A possible answer is that their education system values above all else reading, writing and arithmetic. I’ve always found that odd. It’s

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Fresh Look At Crosswordese

      Apr 25, 2024

      A Fresh Look At Crosswordese
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Beauty Of LANGUAGE

      Feb 4, 2021

      What does a Jerusalem artichoke have to do with Jerusalem? Why do we fall head over heels when that’s the right way up? And doesn’t having your cake and eating it make total sense? If you’ve ever pondered any of these linguistic curiosities, the answ

      3 min read

    • Article

      Call Them What They Wants

      Sep 4, 2018

      Call Them What They Wants
      8 min read

    • Article

      Another Brick In Your Wall?

      Apr 8, 2022

      Another Brick In Your Wall?
      9 min read

    • Article

      Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

      Dec 5, 2017

      As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski oversees the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time

      2 min read

    • Article

      Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

      Dec 13, 2017

      As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski oversees the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time

      2 min read

    • Article

      How to, Like, Speak Better

      May 2, 2023

      How to, Like, Speak Better
      8 min read

    • Article

      Triumph Of Te Reo

      Sep 11, 2023

      Triumph Of Te Reo
      4 min read

    • Article

      Reading Their World

      Oct 1, 2020

      Reading Their World
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cryptic Classroom #5: Homophones

      Dec 9, 2021

      Cryptic Classroom #5: Homophones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Revealed…

      Mar 10, 2020

      Revealed…
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for I Used to Know That

    2.5/5

    3 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      I Used to Know That - Patrick Scrivenor

      This edition first published in 2021

      First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

      Michael O’Mara Books Limited

      9 Lion Yard

      Tremadoc Road

      London SW4 7NQ

      ISBN: 978-1-84317-935-1 in ePub format

      ISBN: 978-1-84317-936-8 in Mobipocket format

      ISBN: 978-1-78243-256-2 in paperback print format

      Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2010, 2021

      All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

      A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Typeset and designed by Design 23

      www.mombooks.com

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by Caroline Taggart

      Introduction

      PARTS OF SPEECH

      GRAMMAR

      SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION

      PUNCTUATION

      CLEAR USAGE

      PITFALLS AND CONFUSIONS

      Afterword

      Further Reading

      Index

      FOREWORD

      When the original version of I Used to Know That was published two years ago, I spent a very jolly couple of days in a small BBC studio in central London. With headphones over my ears and a microphone in front of me, I talked to people on radio stations all over the country about the book: why I had written it, what they liked about it and what brought back hideous memories.

      To my surprise, the hideous memories were what excited people most. Top of the list – and this bit wasn’t a surprise – was maths. One listener said that just looking at the letters a + b = c on the page had brought him out in a cold sweat, even though he no longer had any idea why. Another radio station carried out a series of interviews in the street asking people, among other things, if they knew who Pythagoras was. ‘Oh yes,’ said one man, ‘he’s to do with triangles and angles and all that malarkey.’

      I thought that was wonderful: ‘all that malarkey’ summed up perfectly the way many of my generation were taught. We had to learn it (whatever ‘it’ was); we were never really told why; and, once exams were over, unless we went on to be engineers or historians or something, we never thought about it again. But it lingered somewhere at the back of our minds, which may be why I Used to Know That touched a chord.

      However, covering five major subjects and including a catch-all chapter called General Studies meant that a single small volume couldn’t hope to deal with anything in much depth. This is where the individual titles in this series come in: if I Used to Know That reminded us of things that we learnt once, these books will expand on them and explain why they were important. If you enjoy this one, look out for I Used to Know That: Geography, Maths, History and General Science as well.

      The argument over the rights and wrongs of laying down rules for a living, breathing, language will continue to rage as long as English is spoken. Yet there have to be some guidelines if what you say or write is to be comprehensible to the people who hear or read it. If there were no tenses for verbs, there would be no way of knowing if an action took place in the past, present, future or might-have-been. If words didn’t have precise meanings, they would become – well, meaningless. And if you tried to say something complicated without understanding the way a sentence should be put together, you would end up as confused as your listeners. On the other hand, if you spoke the same way as your grandparents did, you would still be talking about the wireless and putting an apostrophe in front of ’bus. So where does ‘correctness’ end and stagnation begin?

      If you were ever taught grammar, this may well be stirring up some of those hideous memories I mentioned earlier. If you belong to the era when teaching you the rules of your own language was deemed unnecessary, it may leave you more confused than ever.

      Fortunately, in either case, help is at hand in the genial form of Patrick Scrivenor, whose mantra is, wherever possible, ‘keep it simple’. He admires accuracy, but despises pedantry. While clarifying the difference between a future perfect and a future continuous and reminding us how to tell a possessive pronoun from a correlative conjunction, he reassuringly shares our bafflement about the many facets of English (not least of them spelling) that defy logic. Like us, he has been known to confuse ‘militate’ and ‘mitigate’ and dithered over whether to write ‘convertable’ or ‘convertible’. So while telling us the difference between right and wrong when it matters, he can also advise us not to worry about it when it doesn’t. Anxieties over grammar, spelling and ‘correct’ usage have never been dealt with so soothingly.

      CAROLINE TAGGART

      LONDON, 2010

      INTRODUCTION

      Languages pre-date their rules. They are usually in existence, and freely spoken, long before they are written and long before anyone starts to systematize their rules. They rarely have rules that have been thought out logically in advance. Even languages that developed in a period of literacy, such as modern English, evolved like this. Languages also continue to evolve, and what look like set rules are constantly modified or even abandoned. It is very hard to say what is correct, and what incorrect.

      All the same, in the classroom we were taught the difference between formal English and colloquial English. We were taught to obey certain rules of grammar, vocabulary and spelling, and these constitute our understanding of what is good English.

      There are many varieties of English – national, regional, and class. Which variety were you taught at school? The likelihood is that you were taught Standard Written English – the formal version of English taught both to mother-tongue English speakers, and to foreigners learning English as a second language. In other words, Standard English is a matter of education. There are different varieties of Standard English, British and American being the two main ones. But their similarities far outweigh their divergences, and Standard English is well on the way to becoming an international language among people educated in a certain way and to a certain level. This book concentrates on British Standard English. American English is mentioned where differences in grammar, spelling or vocabulary might cause confusion.

      How much grammar can you remember? Are you red hot on the use of the subjunctive? Is it your second nature never to use a preposition at the end of a sentence? Wake up boy! How about the distinction between ‘will’ and ‘shall’?

      Without going so far as to shout, ‘Wake up!’ at you, this book will reacquaint you with all that stuff you once saw written on the blackboard. I have tried to retain the traditional terms of grammar that you would have heard at school. I have had to feel my way to some extent with this, since how you were taught English grammar depends to some extent on where you were at school and how long ago. But we are concerned here only with how to use vocabulary, grammar, punctuation and spelling to write clear, concise English.

      So, I want you to settle down at the back of the class and open your exercise books, because we’re going to crack straight on with Parts of Speech.

      PATRICK SCRIVENOR

      APRIL 2010

      PARTS OF SPEECH

      Words are constructed of letters. The five vowels and twenty-one consonants of English express sounds made by the human vocal cords, tongue and mouth. Together or singly, these sounds make words. The ‘parts of speech’ classify words by what they do. So, nouns name people and things, verbs express action, adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs and so on. Depending on how many nits you want to pick, there are ten parts of speech in English.

      Of course, it’s not as easy as that. Grammarians down the ages have delighted in splitting hairs and making distinctions. Even after ditching the most pedantic, there are still many variants of all the parts of speech.

      Here they are.

      NOUNS

      NAMING NAMES

      ‘Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named John!’

      – Sam Goldwyn, when a friend told him what he had called his son.¹

      Nouns name. Your own names are nouns. Furthermore, they are proper nouns, naming a specific single person, place or thing:

      Dame Edna Everage

      Sydney Harbour Bridge

      Australia

      They are usually given a capital first letter, and proper nouns that refer to events are often preceded by ‘the’:

      the Industrial Revolution

      the Second World War

      Some titles also take ‘the’:

      the President (but President Lincoln)

      the Queen (but Queen Elizabeth)

      It is not always easy to distinguish proper nouns from other nouns. For instance, the names of birds or flowers unquestionably refer to a single ‘thing’ – the species of bird or flower indicated. But the word ‘chaffinch’ or

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1